Blood & Gold

By Leo Kanaris

Athens. Autumn. The start of a crazy week for private investigator George Zafiris. On Monday a friend is killed by a hit and run driver. On Tuesday the body vanishes. On Wednesday Zafiris begins to ask questions, and on Thursday the first death threats are made. By Friday things are starting to get complicated. A brilliant young concert violinist disappears, quickly followed by her husband.
The police seem to be co-operative, but everywhere Zafiris looks, he finds obstructions, dishonesty, mysterious delays. As the country's debt crisis takes its toll on the people of Athens, suicides and illness proliferate. Zafiris finds his own life spinning dangerously out of control.
A few days in an ancient monastery on Mount Athos seem to offer some respite. But there's a surprise waiting there too.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in Greece and who like their crime fiction written in the Scandinavian manner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus Ebooks
• Release date: Aug 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781910213575

Leo Kanaris

Leo Kanaris was a teacher for many years. He now writes full time and lives in southern Greece. He is the author of two novels featuring the private investigator George Zafiris: Codename Xenophon and Blood & Gold. He is currently working on his third George Zafiris novel, Dangerous Days.

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Part One

The Man on a Bicycle

1 Meeting in Maroussi

Athens, September 2015. George Zafiris, private investigator, was seated at a café in Maroussi, reading a police report. A cup of Greek coffee stood untouched on the table in front of him. The day was cool for the time of year and a breeze ruffled the paper in his hands.

‘On Friday 29 August a bearded man, 50 years of age, wearing a grey suit, was riding a bicycle along Spyros Louis Avenue, between the Olympic Stadium and the Golden Hall. A truck loaded with firewood was travelling behind. For unknown reasons the man on the bicycle lost his balance and was hit by the truck. An emergency call was received by police at 11.03 am. Service vehicles arrived at 11.15 am. The driver of blue Magirus Deutz HK 4596, Gavrilis Pagakis, aged 37 from Larissa, was arrested and charged with manslaughter. The victim died from his injuries. He has been identified as Mr Mario Filiotis, Mayor of Astypalea.’

George read the report a second time, folded it, laid it on the table.

Opposite him sat Colonel Sotiriou, Head of the Violent Crimes Unit, watching him closely.

‘Well?’ said Sotiriou.

‘It’s written by a moron,’ he said.

‘I agree it’s not a model of report writing,’ said Sotiriou. ‘But you can’t be sure the person who wrote it is a moron.’

‘OK,’ said George. ‘Maybe he’s just badly trained. Maybe he’s on drugs. Maybe his head is being scrambled by death-rays from outer space. That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’

‘Why did Mario Filiotis fall off his bicycle? He wasn’t a man to do that.’

‘Good question.’

‘You must know who wrote this.’

Sotiriou gazed back at him blankly.

‘I take that to mean yes?’

Sotiriou did not answer directly. ‘He’s no fool,’ he said.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He passed the report to me personally.’

‘And what were you supposed to do with it? Apart from the obvious.’

Sotiriou did not reply.

‘This was a road accident,’ said George, ‘not a violent crime.’

‘Exactly.’

Sotiriou eyed him attentively.

‘OK,’ said George. ‘So he knows more.’

‘That is what I assume.’

‘Have you asked him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

The Colonel ignored the question. ‘Give me the report,’ he said.

George pushed the sheet of paper across the table. The Colonel held a cigarette lighter to one corner. The report flared and shrivelled in the ashtray.

‘What’s the officer’s name?’ asked George.

‘Karás,’ said the Colonel. ‘Lieutenant Nikolaos Karás.’

‘Can I talk to him?’

‘Only in private.’

‘How am I going to do that?’

‘He plays rugby.’

‘Rugby?’

‘That’s right.’

George was puzzled.

‘It’s a kind of football,’ said Sotiriou. ‘Played with an olive-shaped ball.’

‘I know that, for heaven’s sake!’

‘His team is the Attica Warriors. They train on Tuesday evenings. Olympic complex, B ground. Go there tomorrow, half past eight. Watch the last ten minutes of training. He’ll find you.’

‘Suppose I’m busy tomorrow?’

‘If you want the job, be there.’

‘And who’s my client?’ asked George.

‘For the moment I am.’

‘You?’

‘In strict confidence.’

‘Are you paying?’

‘Funds will be provided.’

‘Public or private?’

‘Let me worry about that.’

Sotiriou stood up. They shook hands without warmth and the Colonel slipped away.

George stayed to finish his coffee. He replayed the conversation in his mind, seeing the Colonel’s face, his grey-green eyes, the skull-bones thinly covered by tight yellow skin. He was an odd man. Cold, scholarly, hard to fathom. He had insisted on meeting in Maroussi, miles from his office. George had asked yesterday for the police report on Mario’s death, expecting to be refused. Sotriou had offered it at once.

He paid the bill and walked down Thiseos Street, past a beggar child mangling out La Cucuracha on an accordion, past empty shops with peeling yellow ‘To Let’ notices, past another beggar – an old man in a worn-out suit kneeling on a folded newspaper – until he came to a bakery on the square. Hot bread smells wafted through the doorway.

He asked for horiátiko psomí and handed over two euros. Fifty cents came back with a rustic loaf, still warm in a paper bag. He held it to him like a baby. Outside on the pavement, he dropped the fifty-cent coin into the old man’s palm and was thanked politely in return. This was no professional beggar. The voice was educated. He looked like a retired schoolmaster or bank clerk. What torments had this man been through? George did not feel like asking. There were too many cases like that in this endless, tedious crisis.

His friend Mario was dead. He had no space in his heart for anyone else right now.

George walked back up Thiseos Street to his motorbike, unlocked the luggage box and rested the loaf among a jumble of receipts and business cards. He owed the bike to Mario, who had told him to stop driving a car in the city.

‘And how the hell am I supposed to get around?’ George had asked.

‘Ride a bike.’

‘A bike in Athens? Think I want to kill myself?’

Mario replied: ‘Just living here a bit of you dies every day.’ He swung the Ducati off its stand, kicked the starter, felt the rush of force as he revved the engine. He accelerated quickly into the stream of cars.

On Kifissias Avenue, riding south, he kept thinking of his friend. Above the traffic, the glass towers, the dark haze of exhaust fumes, he glanced up at the blue sky, in which a few monumental nimbus clouds hung suspended. Out there in space he could imagine Mario’s soul floating – planing like an eagle, surveying the struggle he had been released from. Athens would seem like a toy village to him, its crazy intrigues as inconsequential as the scurryings of an ant-hill.

He hoped that something survived of that remarkable man. An essence, an indestructible core of energy. It seemed unlikely. Yet also necessary. Otherwise what was the point of anything?

The Olympic Stadium loomed up on his right, its white steel arches like the bones of a bird’s wing flung across the sky. On an impulse, he swung off Kifissias onto Spyros Louis. Maybe worth a look, he thought. The scene of the accident.

This road was busy too, a fast-moving horde of cars, trucks and buses. The stadium lay to his right, behind fences, its vast aerial structure a souvenir of the age of extravagance. Where had that all gone? The ambition, the optimism, the belief? All that remained was an enormous bill, the interest payments multiplying, compounding unstoppably, choking the life out of Greece.

He found a place to pull over, where the road widened for a bus stop. He cut the engine and lifted off his helmet, narrowing his eyes at the glare. Around him, a landscape of concrete. Everything on the road moving at seventy to eighty kilometres an hour. A strange place to go cycling. Practically an invitation to some fool talking into his phone to knock you down. But then the whole city was hostile to cyclists. Hostile to pedestrians, dogs, birds, every living thing. George climbed off the bike and picked his way along a narrow strip of pavement. Crushed Coca Cola cans and empty Marlboro packets littered the ground, their colours washed pale by the sun. Weeds thrust pugnacious heads through broken paving stones. The traffic rushed by.

He glanced up, wondering about street cameras. There had to be one along here. All the football matches in the stadium, the wild supporters, the paint-sprayers and seat-burners. That was surely worth a little surveillance? But the lampposts were bare.

Except one, right there opposite the entrance to the stadium. A trio of loose wires dangling off the post like seaweed, just out of reach of his upstretched arm.

He grabbed a quick photo of it on his phone, then straddled his bike and turned for home.

2 Funeral by the Sea

George lived in a 1970s apartment block in Aristotle Street, one of thousands in the centre of Athens. Faced with marble but poorly maintained, it turned a blank and dirty face to the world. Things improved once you got past the grubby entrance hall and up the echoing stairway. An armoured front door, installed a few years ago to discourage unwelcome visitors, led to a five-room apartment, comfortably arranged, with George’s books, pictures, music, collections of seashells and old weapons. Sometimes his son Nick was at home, back from his engineering studies abroad. Sometimes too his wife Zoe – when she was not on Andros, leading the artistic life. At the end of summer she would be in Athens more. Andros was cold and damp in winter.

He unlocked the front door, dropped the loaf on the kitchen table and opened the fridge, looking for a beer. There was a bottle of Fix in the door, but his eye went at once to something else: a package on a shelf. The wrapper was from Lourantos, the cheese and salami shop on Andros.

He closed the fridge without taking the beer and went quietly through to the bedroom. Zoe was asleep there, face down, wrapped in a sheet. A bottle of pills stood open on the bedside table.

He inspected the label. ‘Fermoxan’. He wondered what that might be.

Back in the kitchen, he opened his laptop.

Fermoxan: used in anxiety disorder, depression, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Common side effects: nausea, sexual dysfunction, agitation, blurred vision, constipation, diarrhoea, dizziness, drowsiness, dry mouth, headaches, insomnia, loss of appetite, strange dreams, sweating, tremors, vomiting, weakness, weight gain…

He read this with alarm. Not so much for the grim catalogue of negatives as for what it implied. This was heavy medicine. Prescription only.

George opened the fridge again. This time he took out the bottle of Fix. He levered off the top and sipped the beer, watching the sky, thinking.

Three days ago, he had been in Astypalea. Sprawled in bed in a room he had taken for the night, above the ‘Australia’ taverna, fretting and turning, unable to sleep. He remembered fumbling for his watch in the half-light, struggling to make out the figures. Twenty past five. It was too early to get up – he had slept at two – but his mind was alert and already at work.

He stood up, moved unsteadily into the bathroom and let rip into the gloom. His mouth was dry, head like a blast furnace.

He pulled the chain; pipes gurgled and clanked all around him. He crossed the room to the open window and stared out at the sky. The town lay below, curved and stepped like the tiers of an ancient theatre. The air was cool and damp. A pair of dogs barked, exchanging warlike salutes across the darkness.

As he watched, still half asleep, the air began to brighten. The sun’s first rays struck the fort on the ridge across the bay. They flared on a flagpole, a line of roofs, the whitewashed cupola of a church. Down in the harbour, still in shadow, a row of fishing caïques lay unmoving at the quay.

He pulled on some clothes and splashed water on his face.

In the kitchen, Olga, the owner of the taverna, was salting an enormous piece of lamb. She paused, wiping her hands on aproned flanks.

‘Good morning, Mr Zafiris! Coffee?’

‘Please.’

He watched her stir the little copper pot, the gas flames dancing blue and gold.

‘Did you know Mario?’ he asked.

‘We all knew him.’

‘What was your opinion of him?’

‘A very good man.’

‘And as Mayor?’

‘He did great things.’

‘For example?’

‘The airport. New roads. Restoring old buildings. A man of action. Not the usual politician, who is all talk.’

She began scattering potatoes in the roasting tin: each one seemed a token of Mario’s achievements. ‘Education. Respect for nature. Respect for ourselves. For each other. For the community. We stopped burning rubbish. We cleaned up the beaches, the countryside. We smartened up the town.’

‘He built an airport and roads,’ said George, ‘but respected nature. How did he manage that?’

‘What’s your problem?’

‘It’s usually one or the other,’ said George.

‘Mario held public meetings. Told us that grants from Europe were linked with measures to protect nature. He said, You can’t have one without the other. You must do it right. Proper accounts, receipts, everything. Have you heard of such a thing? In Greece?’

‘Never,’ said George.

‘When a man like that goes, you ask yourself why didn’t God protect him? He always takes the good ones for himself, and leaves us the criminals, the destroyers, the idiots.’

‘Who’ll take his place?’

‘The deputy.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Nothing special. An opportunist. A follower, not a leader.’

‘Will you come to the funeral?’

‘Of course!’

She opened the oven door, letting out a blast of hot air, and shoved the tray of lamb and potatoes in.

‘Everyone will be there. A man like that comes once in a generation, if you’re lucky.’

The coffee bubbled up inside the pot. She poured it into a little white china cup and said, ‘Go out and sit on the terrace. It’s a lovely day. I’ll bring it to you.’

*

At ten o’clock a fishing boat rounded the headland, its mast a white cross against the sea’s blue. George waited on the quay. Around him were figures from the taverna last night: police chief, deputy mayor, director of the archaeological museum… None of Mario’s school-friends had made it from Athens. One or two had sent apologies. The rest not even that.

The locals were out in force. Old people mostly – bent, wiry, their rough faces hacked out of the same rust-brown rock as the island’s farms and roads. The young looked like a different species, fat and pale, crammed into tight black dresses and suits.

Eleni, Mario’s widow, stood out, tall and haggard, with her two teenage sons. Their faces were blank as stone. Next to Eleni, a stocky man in his forties, with an angry, restless air: this was Andreas, Mario’s brother. George walked over and offered his condolences. Eleni thanked him, her green eyes glittering, electric, and said softly, ‘He rests with God.’

The fishing boat touched the quayside. On the foredeck lay the coffin, heaped with white lilies. Six men in dark suits and sunglasses moved forward from the crowd. They climbed on board, hoisted the coffin to their shoulders and stepped awkwardly onto the quay. As they set off towards the town, the crowd formed up behind them.

George walked beside Andreas. It was a tough climb to the church, a steep slope of ribbed concrete, the sun hot on their backs. They trudged heavily, saying nothing. Townsfolk watched from open windows and doorways, crossing themselves as the procession passed.

At last the street curved into the shade and George felt able to think again.

‘This is a crime,’ said Andreas suddenly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They killed him.’

‘Who?’

‘Everyone. Everything.’

‘That’s not a crime.’

‘To me it’s a crime. People abused his generosity.’

‘You can’t prosecute a whole community.’

‘I told him: half the petitioners who come to see you are just trying to cheat their neighbours. The only injustice is what they’re planning – with your help. He gave them all a hearing. Every damned one! Even known liars and tricksters. Why? Why, God damn it?! At the cost of his health? His family?’

‘Everyone says he was a good man.’

‘I’m sick of hearing that.’

The street cut back into the sun.

‘What are you saying?’

‘They killed him! These people, his friends and neighbours, all these hypocrites, crossing themselves, looking so holy and miserable!’

The procession faltered as if his accusation had been blasted out on loudspeakers. One of the pall-bearers, an old man, was in difficulties. His strength seemed to drain from him, his feet became tangled. The man behind lost his rhythm under the lurching weight. The syncopation spread. Before they could stop it the coffin was slipping backwards. They could not hold it. It slithered from their shoulders and hit the ground with a loud crash of splintering wood.

‘Pah!’ snorted Andreas. ‘They can’t even get this right!’

The pall-bearers stopped, wiped sweat off their faces, glad of the rest.

‘You can’t blame the public,’ said George. ‘He should have protected himself.’

‘One hundred per cent! They’re evil, grasping, cheating bastards. Every damned one!’

‘We’ve all lost a friend,’ said George, ‘and you’ve lost a brother. But let’s try to be rational. You can’t blame these people for something that happened on a bicycle in Athens.’

Andreas gave him a look of pity and disgust. ‘You’ll see how they did it,’ he said. ‘Mark my words.’

A murmur began in the crowd, a current of puzzlement. The priest looked about him, his eyes flickering fearfully above the long grey beard. The chief of police stepped forward. Two men started shouting at each other.

Andreas pushed through to the front. ‘What’s going on?’

George followed. Between the mourners he saw the coffin, one corner smashed open, its blue silk interior visible. People looked away as if in shame, but George’s eye was caught by something else, something unexpected. The edge of a clear polythene bag, hanging out of the coffin. He could not see what it contained, but whatever it was it didn’t look right. The chief of police told everyone to stand back. He knelt beside the coffin, picked out the bag, unsealed it, and extracted a square, slender box. He raised the lid and found a layer of tissue paper, which he lifted delicately aside. A wreath of tiny golden leaves sparkled in the sun.

*

While the front line of the crowd marvelled, others pushed forward to get a glimpse. The police chief quickly took charge. ‘The funeral is cancelled,’ he announced. ‘Go home. This is now an incident! A matter for the police!’

He organised a cordon around the damaged coffin and repeated the order to go home.

No one budged.

He surveyed the crowd with disgust. ‘Shame on you,’ he said.

‘We want to know what’s happened,’ said a man.

‘You can see what’s happened!’

The crowd remained and the police chief with a scornful expression pulled a mobile telephone from his pocket.

‘Bring a truck,’ he barked. ‘Up the main street. Outside the bank. The mayor’s funeral has gone tis poutanas.’

Andreas shook his head and muttered, ‘Listen to him, the animal! All he knows is poutanes.’

The police chief turned to the crowd again. ‘I told you to leave,’ he shouted. ‘Move back! Away from the coffin!’

Soon the rumble of a powerful engine could be heard. The police truck appeared at the bottom of the hill and with much shouting and hooting it ground its way forward through the reluctantly parting crowd.

Two young officers jumped out, dropped the tailgate, and with the help of the pall-bearers loaded the coffin onto the back.

‘Where to?’ asked the driver as he opened his door. ‘The cemetery?’

‘Are you mad? Think, man! This is potentially a crime. It needs investigation, a report!’

‘Very good, sir. So… where then?’

‘The station!’

‘Will you come in the truck?’

‘No. I need to stay here, speak to the priest, organise this mess. I want you to unload at the station, put the coffin in a cell and lock it. No one goes near it and you answer no questions! I’ll be there soon.’

An hour later they were crowded into the police station, family and friends, discussing what to do. Five chairs, ten people, cigarettes burning. Voices talking over each other, competing to make the same few obvious points. The coffin was resting on the bed in one of the cells next door.

‘This will have to be officially investigated,’ said the chief of police. ‘It’s a major incident.’

‘All I want to know,’ said Andreas, ‘is where is Mario? Because he sure as hell isn’t in any of those plastic bags!’

It was a question no one could answer. They telephoned the funeral directors in Athens, who said the paperwork was in order. Andreas shouted, ‘This is not about paperwork, you morons. It’s about a man! My brother!’

He slammed down the phone.

They rang the hospital where Mario had been taken, but the receptionist could not get an answer from the mortuary. There was a strike, she said, try again tomorrow.

‘A strike in the mortuary,’ said Andreas. ‘There you have our country in a nutshell. Death wrapped in death. Public services that serve no one but the public servants themselves!’

‘Let’s not exaggerate,’ said the police chief. ‘There are plenty of honest public servants in this country.’

‘They should be exhibited in a museum,’ said Andreas.

The police chief asked the director of the archaeological service to examine the items in the coffin. She opened half a dozen packages and peered at them with a magnifying glass. She pronounced them to be a mixture of Hellenistic and Roman finds, of excellent workmanship and unusually well preserved. Probably from a tomb, a royal or aristocratic burial. She held one of them up, a necklace of tiny golden bees. For a few moments all were spellbound by their delicate beauty.

The police chief asked her what such objects might be doing in a coffin on Astypalea.

She replaced the necklace carefully in its box.

‘Illegal export,’ she said. ‘That’s the most likely explanation. There’s never a shortage of buyers, especially abroad. If that’s the case, and they have been taken illegally from a dig or a museum vault, burial on a quiet island would be a convenient half-way stage on their journey, allowing them